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Simply Perfect

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i must have seen a different film!!

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Garbo had retired long before I became a cinema-goer but I heard about her all my life and eventually I caught the odd performance - Queen Christina and Grand Hotel spring to mind - on TV and saw for myself what all the fuss was about. As a Billy Wilder fan I watched Ninotchka over and over but that was about it until this week when I bought a boxed set of six of her talkies. This, of course, was the first one, produced right at the dawn of Sound in 1930 with all the attendant problems connected with new technology and yes, it is static and yes, it is an obvious stage play adapted crudely for the screen but above and beyond this is GARBO, a towering presence, the personification of charisma and yes, she does render everything else inconsequential. O'Neill didn't do happy endings so it's not the faithful adaptation of his Pulitzer prize-winner that it might have been but here again Garbo makes that academic.

Anna Christie (Greta Garbo) returns to see her father Chris (George F Marion) after 15 years. He is the skipper of a boat and she stays to travel with him. During this time, she meets Matt (Charles Bickford) and they fall in love. Matt and Chris don't see eye to eye and Anna has a secret to confess.....................What a boring story......it starts badly with George F Marion and Marie Dressler playing drunks in a bar. The scene goes on forever and they are both terrible. Its also hard to understand them. In fact, its difficult to understand the whole cast. I missed whole sections of dialogue between Bickford, Marion and Garbo because it is incomprehensible! Garbo is obviously something special as you are drawn to her every time that she is on screen and her presence gives this film the 4 stars that I have given to it. But nothing really happens - its a boring story with atrocious accents. You'll do well to stay awake.

Viewing both of these films concurrently is not a bad idea to get a sense of early film production and acting for the camera styles. I give the nod to Garbo(but not by much)in regard to her naturalness. Robeson is majestic. But his performance is aimed for a large proscenium theater. Something else that struck me was the movies themes of empowerment for women and minorities. There hadn't been any films coming out of Hollywood yet that allowed the voices of marginal characters like Anna and Brutus to take the foreground. These were very progressive films for their time. It's quite probable that O'Neill saw the writing on the wall way before everyone else did about the future of America.

This is Garbo's first ever talking role but she acts as if she has done nothing else before.What makes the movie however hard and also sort of unpleasant to watch is it's storytelling. The movie is set up like a stage-play, so most of the time the characters just sit around and talk. All we see in the first 30 minutes for instance are characters being drunk and complaining a lot about life. The movie is of course also based on a stage-play, so no great wonder that the storytelling in this movie also feels like one. But if I want to watch something like this I would to to the theater. There are of course some good stage-play to movies translations but I guess that back in 1930 they didn't had a real good idea yet or the experience to translate a stage-play well to the silver-screen. The movie is now instead a sort of a bore in parts, since its obviously dragging at moments. The movie is also of course very limited in its settings and the movie often jumps from the one setting to the other, as if the curtain had dropped and a new set had been build-up during the break. The movie just never really feels as one big whole and it instead feels as if it consists out of different acts. It's a very static movie.It's not just only a hard movie to follow because of its storytelling and settings but also because of all of the heavy accents of the actors. On top of that, the sound recording quality of course wasn't that good yet back in 1930 so not everything that is being said is understandable.Also the picture quality of the movie isn't that good anymore. Time hasn't been kind on it. The image is sort of fuzzy in parts and the movie is perhaps more gray than truly black & white.It is definitely true that the movie gets better and better when it heads toward its ending but it didn't made me forget it's way weaker first 30 minutes and disjointed storytelling in the movie overall.6/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/